The Golden Thread

  Gran folded her arthritic fingers in her lap. “Were you happy at the time?”

  “With you in here, so sick? Of course not!”

  She nodded gravely. “Your own feelings weren’t the only ones wrapped up in that spirit light you made, Valentine. There was a committee. The quality of what you made that night was shaped by the mood of each of you, and in every case the mood was one of anxiety or loss. Well, Bosanka, rattling around a strange world and scared to death that she’d never find her people, was perfectly attuned to all that. It drew her.”

  I said, “She may have been lost and everything, but boy, was she mean.”

  Gran patted absently at her hair. “She was scared. That’s when people are most inclined to do others damage.”

  In view of recent experience—just a little while ago I had been ready to try to zap Bosanka into outer space because I was so scared of her—I could hardly disagree.

  “Besides,” Gran added, “she was so disoriented, Val, that she had very uncertain control of her own powers. Which added to her fear, of course, and that made her meaner. She was as used to having magical control as you kids are to turning on light with an electric switch.”

  “She did deer pretty well,” I said.

  “Deer was all she could manage, here. Also, the reality of her home in its current destroyed state kept breaking through into her hunting spell. Dreadful for you, but not reassuring for her, either, believe me.

  “And then of course your committee hadn’t much understanding or control of their own powers, either. It’s all been a bit chaotic. Rather touch-and-go, in fact. The sea-folk were very worried. But I never despaired of you.”

  Through the faded blue of her eyes I could see light shining, light from behind Gran. Through her whole face, actually, and through her hand when she lifted it to dab at her hair again. I tore my thoughts away from this translucence because it scared me, and I didn’t want to be distracted right now from what I knew was a pretty important conversation because . . .

  But that wasn’t a thought I wanted to follow far, either.

  No point in asking whether Gran or anybody from Sorcery Hall would have helped out if we hadn’t been able to handle Bosanka ourselves. In magic, as I had reason to know, you play for keeps and you don’t count on a rescue by the cavalry.

  It looked as if there were a lot of things I just didn’t have to ask about any more. I knew enough to figure out the answers myself.

  Which left me with the main question, the one I didn’t want to deal with, after all.

  I gritted my teeth and I said, “The hospital people think you’re dying Gran.”

  “Oh, I am,” she said.

  I couldn’t accept this, I wouldn’t! Quickly I changed the subject, before I burst into tears. I said angrily, “How come everybody else got met when we came back except Joel? Why didn’t anybody come for him?”

  “Someone is coming,” Gran said. “Don’t you see him?”

  Then I did see him, strolling toward us from the dead end of the short corridor and dressed in the soft, faded corduroy that I remembered: Paavo Latvela, wizard, musician, warrior, friend.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed; my eyes were stinging. “But why is he last, Gran? He should have come first!”

  “He had the longest way to come, lovie,” Gran said, leaning out from the couch to wave at him.

  As Paavo passed him, Joel stood with his mouth open like a boy struck by lightning.

  Gran suddenly had her old embroidered handbag in her lap and was looking through it for something, which had the same effect as if she had walked away and left Paavo and me alone by the candy machine to talk in private.

  I couldn’t seem to focus on the details of Paavo’s appearance. He was caught in some kind of glare in the lighting, so that he shimmered and shifted as I looked at him. The voice, though, was unmistakable, smoky-rough and warm.

  “Good going, Valentine. I won a couple of bets on you.”

  “Oh, any old time, think nothing of it!” I caroled. I was filled with drunken joy. “But, Paavo, what did I do, exactly?”

  “What you think?” Paavo said. He leaned, approximately, on the side of the candy machine and waited for me to reply, as if he was perfectly ready to change his own opinion to match my answer. He wasn’t holding a cigarette, but smoke curled out of his mouth when he spoke—the memory of that old habit.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I helped the Comet Committee to work some good magic.”

  “Yah, for a start,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, feeling a jab of dismay as whole horizons of frustration and annoyance opened ahead of me. “ ‘For a start?’ That doesn’t mean I’m stuck with them forever, does it? The whole committee? Even Mimi and Peter, for God’s sake?”

  “Ah, Val,” he said, blowing more smoke, more like a modest-sized dragon than a smoker. “Everybody needs company, a little, anyway. How do you want it, this business of talent? Only for you, only your family? Sha. You want to be lonesome like that? Believe me, it’s bad for you.”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” I admitted reluctantly, “it sure wasn’t good for Bosanka, was it?”

  Paavo shook his head. “That poor kid,” he said. “I meant to try something to help her along little bit, but—” He shrugged. “You don’t want to let people fall by the wayside. Thanks for taking care of this, Valentine. I don’t think I could have done as good myself.”

  It made me cry a little when he said this to me, the way the winner cries when the Olympic medal is hung around her neck and the band plays her national anthem.

  Paavo murmured something else that I couldn’t catch, something that I felt like a warm touch on my cheek.

  “What?” I whispered, leaning forward to try to hear better, see better.

  He rippled and almost turned into something else right there in front of me. My throat closed up. I was afraid to try to touch him back.

  I said, “Paavo, are you really here?”

  “Here, but not so much Paavo anymore,” he said, smoothing both big hands down to his waist as if literally pressing his body back into its Paavo shape. Sorcery Hall games are played for real, and this wasn’t Paavo as he had been because that man had died and was gone for good. I knew that. Even this shadow of Paavo wasn’t someone I could keep around for long, either.

  He didn’t give me time to get hysterical over having to let him go a second time.

  “Still looks okay, though, right? It’s not so easy to stay in shape these days.” He chuckled. “I better go talk with that boy a little, while I can. Sarah Elizabeth, I’ll wait for you after, long as I can, yah?”

  Gran, going at her hair with a little pink plastic comb now, nodded. “I’ll try to be quick,” she said, and my heart gave a little hop of alarm. Things were moving much too fast as it was, without any more quickness.

  Paavo turned toward Joel, who backed up a step and then stood there, rocking slightly, with this expression of hopeless longing that made me want to cry.

  Paavo walked over and reached out to put his hand on the back of Joel’s neck, shaking him a little while he talked to him. Joel lowered his head, listening to whatever Paavo was saying to him. Then the two of them walked up and down the hall.

  “He’s not staying around, is he, Gran,” I said. “So where’s he going?”

  “Oh, moving on, lovie,” Gran said. “And so must I. You’ll let us go lightly, won’t you? Clinging on can detain us a long time, you know. But we have our own travels to take up, while you and Joel and the others take up the next stage in your own studies.”

  I made a grab for her arm, but my hand passed through something like warm sunlight. She was up and wavering slightly in front of me, the way Paavo had wavered.

  You lose, I thought; you lose them both.

  “Gran, what happened?” I begged. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Why, nothing,” she said. “You did most of it right. I’m so pleased; we put an application through Admissions fo
r you. Your work with Bosanka has been found acceptable as an entrance examination.”

  “Entrance to what?” I said, getting up to follow her where she drifted, shining faintly, ahead of me.

  “To Sorcery Hall, of course,” she said. “Bosanka passed her great test, and you and your friends have passed yours. You’ve all passed with flying colors. The Comet Committee makes a fine entering class.”

  I couldn’t see her anymore, only a line of light swooping down the middle of the hallway, back toward her hospital room. That light filled my whole sight, dazzling me so that I couldn’t see Joel or Paavo or the nursing station or anything.

  So I followed the line of light, like a person feeling her way along a rope. I could actually put my hands on it. The guideline was warm to the touch.

  My shin collided with something, and by squinting and looking to the side of the line of light, I saw that I had arrived at the edge of Gran’s bed. I stood holding a loop in a thread of light that seemed to come from the center of Gran’s still form. The main length of the line curved away upward from my hand into a huge darkness where the ceiling should be.

  Gran lay on her back like a doll of dry, yellow wax. But the real Gran hovered someplace past sight, tethered to what was left on the bed by this cord of light. The machines around the plastic oxygen tent over Gran continued to make their breathing and sighing noises.

  I let go of the golden loop I was holding, and all the length of it that I could see rippled and then slowly resettled itself, floating upward into the dark in one long, smooth curve.

  Mom was watching me. Her eyes looked puffy. I wondered how much she could see; everything, I suspected.

  “Val,” she said, barely in a whisper. “Oh, honey, you look so tired.”

  I didn’t answer. I think I was actually too tired to talk.

  My mom is a lot shorter than I am, but she didn’t look it then. There was something tall and firm about the way she sat in that ugly hospital chair. She showed no sign of fear, not even when she turned her head to look up at the line of light, toward where it disappeared into what looked like the deepest place in deep, deep space.

  Which was where Gran wanted to go, with Paavo. If only she was let free to go.

  I wanted to help, but at the same time I knew my hands would sooner fly up and throttle me than do what Gran needed done. She’d told me often about how long her own mother and grandmother had lived, back in Scotland. Her forebears were physically little but “tough as old boots,” she’d said.

  Too tough for an easy ending. And I wasn’t tough enough.

  “Mom,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

  She got up. “You don’t have to,” she said. “My daughter didn’t save me from a wicked wizard for nothing.”

  She reached up for the line of light hovering above Gran’s body and drew a floaty curve of it down to her own chest level. She bent down to kiss Gran’s cheek. Then she parted the thread of light with the lightest, most delicate tug, and she opened both hands and let go.

  We watched as the bright thread curled quickly away and disappeared into the darkness overhead.

  I heard my mother say softly, “ ’Bye, Mom.”

  Then she and the bed and the oxygen tent and all rushed away from me. I toppled like a tree, thinking, Aha, fainting from hunger—you should have had a candy bar while you had the chance.

  19

  The Hands of Wechsler II

  GRAN—THE PART OF HER that had been lying there living off the support machines—lingered for nearly two more days. Mom and I both knew that she was gone long before that, but we didn’t even talk about it: we just took our turns at the side of the hospital bed until the doctor was satisfied that what she seemed to think was still Gran had died.

  The members of the Comet Committee came to the memorial service, though most of them had never met Gran. We talked afterward, in the little graveyard attached to the church. It turns out that each of us was met by the lake that night by somebody important to us that night. No one went into detail about it, which seemed to be okay all around. Even in a committee, privacy is privacy.

  Anyway, there was good news: Lennie’s ear infection had cleared up and he was going to Hawaii on the dolphin project, with special leave from school and despite being younger than anyone they’d ever had. He said he had mixed feelings about being gone so long, but I think he was just worried that while he’s away, Joel and I are going to get, well, closer.

  Strolling around the graveyard after, I told Lennie to relax, nobody was making life decisions here.

  “How do you know?” he said, carefully not looking at me. “It’s a good place for it.” He cocked his head at the nearest tilted headstone. The only part of the inscription that hadn’t been worn away were the words “Beloved husband.”

  Corny, but nice.

  Our good-byes were a little awkward (what isn’t these days? I can’t wait to get older). I keep hoping that while Lennie’s away he’ll grow a few inches so he’s my height or over.

  It’s a stupid prejudice, to favor boys who are taller than I am, but I can’t shake it. Hanging out with the whales did not make me perfect, I notice. Darn.

  Lennie sent me a postcard with a picture of a dolphin on it a week after he got to Hawaii. He sure knows how to make me miss him.

  On the postcard he wrote that he feels like he knows all this stuff about cetaceans that nobody else knows, but there’s no way to tell it without becoming very unpopular. Scientists are not big on visionary experiences, which is a neat way to put it. So he keeps his mouth shut and helps teach dolphins to do goofy things like carry plastic rings and squares around on their noses.

  None of us still have our understanding of the sea-speech from that night, though sometimes Mimi says she almost remembers. But with Mimi, who knows? She reads books about primitive religion and shamanism, but if you ask her a serious question—about what it’s like to be a deer, say—she says she doesn’t know what you’re talking about. She’s probably still a ditz, though it’s hard to tell.

  My mom, who never wanted anything to do with the family talent let alone Sorcery Hall, has figured out her own way to deal with what happened.

  “I had a very odd dream,” she said to me while we were going through some of Gran’s things, picking out stuff for donations and so on. She started describing that night at the lake and the hospital.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” I said. “You know that, Mom.”

  “Sweetheart,” she said, shoving a stack of hatboxes into my arms, “when it comes to this business, you’re going to have to go your way, and let me go mine. I did what I could, but I’m the same person I was, and that person does not attend magic school.”

  And she gave me a look, sort of distressed but determined, that meant this was what she’d intended to say when she brought the subject up: that she’s pretty well given up on trying to keep me clear of magic, but that she wasn’t ready to opt in, herself.

  I can’t accept this. I mean, what happened that night was incredible, and I can’t stand to see my mom shut herself away from it all. She’s a good person, she deserves something special.

  Of course, she thinks she has it: Manley has asked Mom to marry him. She could do a lot worse (she almost did, once), and it seems undeniable that my mother was not designed to live alone.

  Barb said, “You got nothing to complain about. At least your mom stays out of your face. Mine is always after me. My clothes are too sexy, my table manners are too sloppy, my friends are scuzzy—well, some of my friends, anyway. She thinks you’re all right, Valentine. She should know what you’ve gotten me into!”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, “how’s it different from the magic guy you met in Barbados with your aunt right there?”

  Barb rolled her eyes heavenward. “My mother thinks it’s extremely racially retro to give any kind of recognition to ‘the paranormal’, as she calls it to put down words like ‘witch doctor’, ‘spooky’, and, heaven forbid, ‘juju’. I haven’
t even shown her these pictures.”

  She had called me to come see what had come out of the Leica, seawater and all. Something had preserved the camera and the film, and the images were of things we had seen with our own eyes that night in the boat—leaping forms curved above waves, the huge bulk of the monster whale rising against the grainy moonlit sky, glimpses of our faces big-eyed and openmouthed or smiling crazily—pictures there hadn’t been enough light to take, impossible pictures.

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

  “Keep them,” she said. “I’ll just keep them. And keep them to myself.”

  We both were quiet for a minute, thinking about the great undesirability of letting the pictures fall into the wrong hands, like, say, those of her brother, who would probably run out to sell them to the Post or something, if he could make up a wild enough story of his own to account for them.

  I glanced over the pictures again. “Funny, there isn’t a single picture of Bosanka here.”

  “I wouldn’t keep one if there was,” Barb said. “Goodbye and good riddance.”

  I laughed. “Well, I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I figured out that we were just, ah, secondary characters in her heroic quest,” I said. “But what the heck, I’m learning to appreciate it. A little. I think.”

  Barb said, “Are you thinking about writing about it, like it really was a story? If you do, do me a favor. Leave me out of it.”

  “But you were part of it,” I objected. “Even if you did have to put aside some pretty strong feelings, when it came down to it.”

  “Some feelings don’t get put aside.”

  “Hey, come on,” I said. “Did you or did you not help us do that second comet to get Bosanka back to her people?”

  She just looked at me.

  “Barb,” I said. “You did, or we wouldn’t have been able to do it!”

  She said, “There were seven people in the original Comet Committee. Lennie’s right, people who know about this kind of stuff say that seven is a special number. But with Bosanka herself in the circle, there would have been eight. Joel handed me the violin. I took it so his hands would be free. Joel was your seventh, not me.”